After raising pre-series A round in March 2015, online travel community startup, Tripoto has now raised another round of funding from 500 Startups, IDG Ventures & Advantedge fund. Angels including Neeraj Arora (VP, Watsapp) and Leon Seynave also participated in the round.

Since its last fund raise in March, its app downloads have gone from 0 to 250,000 and the cumulative monthly users across platforms have increased more than 3 times – from 600,000 to 2 million.

Tripoto, which is around 2-years-old, wants to further leadership in technology, content and community with addition of video content, automated content creation tools, social publishing features and personalization.

“We are now working towards the extreme personalization of the user experiences on Tripoto through our own collected big data in travel. Personalized news-feeds, native ads and the deep integration of hotels and homestays into the content are the next steps for us. It is important that hotels and homestays that are relevant to the content and the context of the traveler and we are in a very strong position to solve that.” – said Anirudh Gupta, Founder and CEO, Tripoto.

The company seeks to be a one-stop app for travellers to discover, plan and in near future, carry out transactions around the community model. It plans to continue to raise more capital to grow at an even faster pace and further look beyond India at a later stage.

“Users are publishing their travel stories, itineraries and experiences in large numbers on our platform. Our content is highly structured with mapped data, timestamps, GPS location which allows innumerable applications of our data.” – said Michael Lyngdoh, Founder of Tripoto.

The other players in the same space are SmartAirTrip and iTraveller among others. SmartAirTrip raised $10 million at a valuation of $100 million from unnamed investors in February this year. Also, in the same month, the another Bengaluru-based iTraveller.com, a technology driven travel marketplace startup based in Bangalore, raised its Series A funding of $1 million through ah! Ventures’ investment network, CLUB ah!. User-generated content seems to be the way ahead for travel communities. Tripadvisor too, which is one of the biggest travel communities, is driven by its users. Can this India based startup compete with it?